THERE are a lot of things in this world that I have prejudged correctly:
Cheeze Whiz does, it turns out, taste like melted sandwich bags; the new Three Musketeers movie was written for and by infants; Segways, contrary to popular belief, didn't herald the end of walking.
For much of my life, I had assumed I had correctly prejudged baseball in the same way. Going to a game, I figured, would be marginally less fun than slowly filing off my own teeth. But a trip to a minor league event in 2009 proved me wrong. The story, I think, holds a lesson for all of us.
My complete lack of interest in watching sports dates back to childhood. My parents, newly emigrated from the U.K., were deeply unimpressed by the offerings on this side of the ocean.
Cricket wasn't a thing here; nobody ever chased cheese anywhere; and in terms of prestige, association football ranked somewhere between water polo and hotdog eating. As a result, we never went to professional games and sports were rarely on our TV.
In this vacuum, my tastes in entertainment trended naturally away from the athletic and towards the awesome: GI Joe, He-Man, Star Trek and all their pulsepounding ilk.
Next to these shows, sports just couldn't compare: Games rarely took place anywhere but Earth; players didn't have any kind of special powers; no one had to vapourize anyone to win.
How did these shows have ratings? "Ooh, look someone has a ball. Now someone else has a ball. Where will this adventure take us next?"
The stakes, in the big scheme of things, seemed meaningless. What's winning the Orange Bowl compared to saving Earth from lava monsters? Who cares who takes the Stanley Cup if no one has dealt with the tear in the fabric of time? ("Oh man, did you see that hit on- Agh! Pterodactyls!")
Maybe if jets were literally taking on sharks in the playoffs it would be a different story, but, in my experience anyway, the names were always disappointingly figurative.
This isn't to say I wasn't into sports at all. As a strange, skinny child I preferred activities that required little physical activity beyond putting medium sized pebbles in a tumbler or looking up a particularly interesting field mushroom (no joke - I still have that book somewhere). Nevertheless, the few organized sports I was forced to partake in I kind of enjoyed. I could see the appeal of running around in confusion and throwing stuff and yelling. In fact, I sort of liked baseball, even though hitting and sprinting weren't really strengths, and pop flies, by and large, rarely hit me in the hands.
But liking to play something isn't the same as liking to see it played: I may enjoy napping on the couch, but I wouldn't necessarily pay to watch someone do it professionally.
What's more, of all the options on the table, baseball was clearly the worst. In soccer there's at least lots of movement; in football people fall over a lot; in baseball, the players' time is taken up almost entirely with looking and chewing. Plus you have this huge bat, and you're not even allowed to hit anyone with it.
Anyway, bottom line was I never watched it until one summer day three years ago when I was invited to a Vancouver Canadians game for a friend's birthday.
I expressed some skepticism at the time, saying something to the effect that: a) I didn't believe that was a real team, and b) even if it was, I couldn't go till I'd built a snowman in hell. But they wore me down and eventually I went.
The first two innings passed very much as expected: a series of people trying one after another to hit a ball, and, on occasion, other people going and getting it.
But then, about 25 minutes in, things took a turn for the dramatic: It started to rain - really, really rain. This was not a regular summer shower. This was a biblical-scale, NicolasCage-movie-style extinctionlevel downpour. There was lightning. There was thunder. Terrified stadium staff ran out and covered the diamond with a giant tarp, and then dashed for shelter.
Obviously, that was pretty good in itself, but things got even better. When it became clear the weather wasn't going to let up, both teams sent out their rookies to entertain the crowd. There was tarp sliding; there were dance routines; there was a guy who came out with his uniform upside down so it looked like he was running around on his hands (I'm not making this up). There was even a streaker and security guards to tackle him. Finally, after about 45 minutes, they called an end to the show, and - get this - gave me a credit for my ticket. I had been completely entertained, and I hadn't had to pay a dime for it.
Maybe I had misjudged this sport, I thought. Maybe, just maybe, I had been too quick to dismiss something I had never experienced. So later that summer, against my instincts, I went back to cash in my ticket credit, to give this hated pastime another chance.
Turns out I was right. Baseball sucks.
The lesson, I guess, is this: You should try everything once, but not necessarily twice.
Now, about that tear in space. . . .
